New Mass translation launches in American parishes

Richard Fiore of Mont­gomery, Ala., his son Oscar, mom Vicki and son Phipps, from left, par­tic­i­pate in Mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mont­gomery, Ala. Catholics nation­wide began using a new trans­la­tion of the Roman Missal on Nov. 27, 2011. (Asso­ci­ated Press | David Bundy)

TOM BREEN

Asso­ci­ated Press

CLAYTON, N.C. — English-speaking Roman Catholics who have reg­u­larly attended Mass for years found them­selves in an unfa­mil­iar posi­tion Sun­day, need­ing printed cards or sheets of paper to fol­low along with a rit­ual many have known since childhood.

“I don’t think I said it the right way once,” said Matthew Hoover, who attends St. Ann Catholic Church in Clay­ton, a grow­ing town on the edge of the Raleigh sub­urbs. “I kept for­get­ting, and say­ing the old words.”

The Mass itself — the cen­tral rit­ual of the Catholic faith — hasn’t changed, but the Eng­lish trans­la­tion has, in the largest shakeup to the every­day faith of believ­ers since the upheavals that fol­lowed the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Coun­cil in the 1960s. A years-long process of revi­sion and nego­ti­a­tion led to an updated ver­sion of the Roman Missal, the text of prayers and instruc­tions for cel­e­brat­ing Mass, which orig­i­nally was writ­ten in Latin. The new trans­la­tion was rolled out across the English-speaking Catholic world on Sun­day after months of preparation.

Mickey Mat­tox, a pro­fes­sor at Milwaukee’s Mar­quette Uni­ver­sity, said he was happy with the idea that the bish­ops wanted the trans­la­tions as accu­rate as possible.

Adapt­ing to the changes “was a lot less dif­fi­cult than I thought it might be,” said Mat­tox, 55, adding, “even though prob­a­bly all of us are going to end up hold­ing our wor­ship fold­ers for a few weeks until we mem­o­rize all the new language.”

The Rev. George Witt, pas­tor of the Church of St. Ignatius Loy­ola on New York’s Park Avenue, started the 11 a.m. Mass by not­ing Sun­day was not only the first day of Advent, but also the first day to use the new Missal. He directed parish­ioners to a pam­phlet inserted into the back of the now-outdated hym­nal that spelled out the new word­ing. A notable num­ber of wor­ship­pers stum­bled after the priest said, “Peace be with you.” The new response is “And with your spirit” instead of “And also with you.” But many oth­ers con­fi­dently gave the right response.

Kath­leen McCor­mack, a church vol­un­teer and for­mer school teacher, said she didn’t like the new trans­la­tion and didn’t under­stand why the church needed a trans­la­tion closer to Latin.

“Con­sub­stan­tial? What is that word?” McCor­mack said, refer­ring to a term in the retrans­lated Nicene Creed that replaces lan­guage call­ing Jesus “one in being with the Father.”

But she saw a cau­tion­ary tale in the many Catholics she saw dis­tance them­selves from the church over changes made after the mod­ern­iz­ing reforms of the Sec­ond Vat­i­can Council.

“It’s not shak­ing my church expe­ri­ence,” said McCor­mack, as she handed out church bul­letins. “You have the spirit between you and God and the words are insignificant.”

Most of the changes are actu­ally to prayers recited by the priest, but some of the changes for prayers spo­ken or sung by the con­gre­ga­tion revise famil­iar words that for some peo­ple are spo­ken almost auto­mat­i­cally after years of churchgoing.

Along with the new response and unfa­mil­iar words, the affir­ma­tion “We believe” has been replaced with “I believe” in the Nicene Creed. Some of the lan­guage seems more for­mal or poetic: the word “cup” has become “chalice.”

“It’s more British in some ways,” said Mon­signor Michael Clay, pas­tor of St. Ann. “But this is the first time that every English-speaking coun­try in the world will be using the same trans­la­tion of the Mass.”

Clay likes the new trans­la­tion, find­ing it closer to the Latin text that is still the church’s offi­cial lan­guage. But some priests and parish­ioners have been less enthu­si­as­tic, crit­i­ciz­ing the new ver­sion as too pon­der­ous or dis­tant, and in some cases cir­cu­lat­ing peti­tions ask­ing for a delay in intro­duc­ing the new missal.

Mari­beth Lynch, 51, a pub­lisher from the Mil­wau­kee sub­urb of Elm Grove, said she was “dis­traught” over the changes and would refuse to “learn the damn prayers.”

“It’s ridicu­lous. I’ve been a Catholic for 50 years, and why would they make such stu­pid changes? They’re word changes. They’re seman­tics,” she said.

“It’s con­fu­sion. All it’s doing is caus­ing con­fu­sion,” she said. “You want to go to church and be confused?”

The roots of the new trans­la­tion go back to that epochal coun­cil held at the Vat­i­can in the 1960s, which allowed Mass in lan­guages other than Latin. An English-language missal was pro­duced by 1973, but that was intended to be tem­po­rary while improve­ments were made.

In 2001, the Vat­i­can office that over­sees wor­ship issued a direc­tive requir­ing trans­la­tion of the Eng­lish missal that would be closer to the Latin rather than to more famil­iar ver­nac­u­lar speech. Numer­ous revi­sions and bish­ops’ meet­ings even­tu­ally pro­duced agree­ment on the trans­la­tion being used Sunday.

Parishes and dio­ce­ses around the coun­try have spent months try­ing to pre­pare Catholics for the change. Descrip­tions of the new trans­la­tion have been printed in weekly bul­letins, sem­i­nars have been held and, since Labor Day, many parishes have been grad­u­ally intro­duc­ing the new trans­la­tion piece by piece, start­ing with the parts of the liturgy that are sung.

Most of those activ­i­ties are for the ben­e­fit of the aver­age Catholic, but it’s priests who have more new mate­r­ial to master.

“I’ve had a new missal in my hands for about three weeks now, and I’ve been lit­er­ally prac­tic­ing the prayers,” Clay said. “I’ve been doing this now for 31 years, and a lot of these prayers I actu­ally know by mem­ory. I have to make sure my brain isn’t get­ting ahead of my mouth.”

Posted by AP News on Nov 27 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.